Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Ballet in the Park

This is an annual show held free to the public. My daughter loves it. I endure it. But it's an opportunity to try and capture some interesting images. Below are some that I thought turned out quite well. Light is always a challenge - it's changing constantly as the dancers move around.

These selections ended up making a nice trio. Black and white seemed to suit the mood.

After a while I came to the realization that I should be using the UniWB setting that I learned about last week. Exposures were being compromised to keep the red channel in check again (the light was quite warm), leaving green and blue way low. This is death as I was shooting higher ISO's to keep the shutter live and wanted to keep the noise to a minimum. As with my initial experience it worked like a charm. These next shots were all taken with UniWB which allowed a much more balanced exposure across all three channels, and subsequently smoother images.

I'm going to need to remember to pull this out of my bag of tricks when lighting and exposures go wonky. So long as you can find a neutral reference as a starting point for white balance correction it's a great system.

Addendum: I had looked at this blog on another computer and noticed the images looked pretty meh. If you're on an uncalibrated system the backgrounds may look lighter than they should be - I've processed them as black and see them as such. If they're coming up looking lighter try and imaging them as black - they look better that way. ;-)